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We have long had a love affair with the car. It has given us the freedom to go where and when we want and it has significantly shrunk the ‘tyranny of distance’. Similarly, the truck has contributed enormously to our economic growth and efficiency. The vast majority of freight is moved by road, taking the lion’s share of the freight task because of its ability to reach all corners of our cities and regions in a timely way.

Our standard of living and our productivity as a nation owe much to road transport.

However, like almost all of our inventions there are substantial downsides. Road transport is a major contributor to greenhouse emissions, is a demanding user of a diminishing energy resource, impacts adversely on our urban amenity and is the single largest cause of death in the first four to five decades of human life. We have not managed these challenges anywhere near as well as we should have.

Let’s focus on safety, which has unquestionably improved enormously but has not begun to approach its potential. We have reduced road-crash death rates from more than 30 per 100,000 people in 1970 to about eight today. Not only rates but absolute numbers have fallen – from more than 3600 deaths in 1970 to fewer than 1500 last year.

But for every death there are still 10 to 14 serious injuries and the impact of both reaches beyond the victim to extended families, circles of friends and workplaces. Almost all Australians know someone personally affected by a road crash. Safety gains are getting smaller and harder to achieve. It is difficult, in the light of the current 20,000 annual deaths and serious injuries, to understand the continuing indifference on the part of the community and its leaders.

Vehicle safety improvements are a significant and ongoing contributor to the reduction of road crash injuries in Australia. Great gains have been made in crashworthiness from the 1950s when Ralph Nader blew the whistle on the auto industry in his book Unsafe at any Speed.

An international regulatory process requires manufacturers to include features such as seatbelts, airbags, collapsible steering columns, engines that slide under the passenger compartment in a head-on crash – and so on through an extensive list. In more recent years the focus has moved from crashworthiness to crash prevention with the advent of anti-lock brakes, electronic stability control and adaptive cruise control, for example, not all of which have yet become the subject of regulation despite compelling evidence of effectiveness.

The international regulatory process moves like treacle. The globalisation of the vehicle industry has slowed progress. Rule-making is greatly influenced by the global market and tends toward lowest common denominator. Second, manufacturers are given several years to prepare for the mandatory adoption of an innovation and only then do the new, safer vehicles begin to percolate through the vehicle fleet.

With an average vehicle age of more than 10 years it takes more than a decade before a safety innovation has reached saturation. This could, of course, be short-circuited by the market demanding features ahead of the regulations.

One way is for manufacturers to market the features itself, but this typically happens only in the form of options for the luxury models in each range. Safety is not seen as a big selling point.

A second way is for the big fleet buyers (governments and corporates) to specify safety features in their fleet orders, which should be a given viewed from an OH&S perspective. Despite many recommendations to this effect, no government in Australia has done so. The decisions rest on considerations of direct fleet costs only, reinforcing the conclusion that society accepts the road toll as a necessary price for mobility.

As Newton discovered centuries ago, kinetic energy is the product of mass times the square of the speed. While vehicles have become safer, the common impact speeds frequently result in forces well beyond those the human body can tolerate. Colliding with a pedestrian at more than 40 kilometres per hour or being struck, in a side impact, at more than 50km/h results in a high probability of death.

The first principle of injury reduction is reducing impact forces to those the human body can tolerate. Manufacturers address the mitigation of kinetic energy but do nothing about speed, which dominates the amount of energy to be managed!

Year upon year the top speed capability and the acceleration performance of cars increases. The industry markets primarily on power and performance, aided and abetted by motoring journalists whose opening paragraph almost always refers to the time it takes to get from 0 to 100km/h.

The speedometer of a modern car shows a top speed between 220 and 300km/h, depending on the model, with the maximum open road speed limit (outside the Northern Territory) being located around top-dead-centre. Well over half the gauge is designed to measure illegal behaviour!

The manufacturers run the argument that speeding is entirely under the control of the driver, reminiscent of the gun lobby’s argument in the film Bowling for Columbine.

The industry and all those who depend upon it go to great lengths to promote the excitement and sheer joy of speed. There are, literally, no vehicle safety design rules pertaining to top speed capability or acceleration performance – meaning governments are complicit on this most critical safety element, perhaps unsurprising given the importance of the industry to the global economy.

In turn, the community seems not to accept that moderating travel speeds is warranted. The common allegation that intense speed enforcement is simply revenue-raising further reinforces this conclusion. It is a fascinating irony that research is now focusing on in-vehicle speed management technologies to moderate speeds to the limits signed; typically via driver-assist modes and continuing to ignore the speed parameter in vehicle design.

There is a considerable body of research that shows great gains in fuel consumption and significant reductions in emissions at lower average travel speeds. Perhaps we should tackle speed management as an issue of sustainable personal mobility – moderating speed is a win for the environment as well as for safety without compromising mobility.

Mobility is not getting from A to B in the minimum possible time – it is having access to all the facilities and services one wants at a time of one’s own choosing. It may be more politically opportune to piggyback upon the sustainability movement than to seek to open the sacred topic of the industry’s promotion of speed to meaningful debate.
 
Professor Ian Johnston AM FTSE is an Adjunct Professor at the Monash University Accident Research Centre and was its Director until retiring at the end of 2006. Ian serves on the Core Advisory Group for the World Bank’s Global Road Safety Facility, is a Director on the Board of the Driver Education Centre of Australia, is Deputy Chairman of Australia’s National Transport Commission and is an Associate Editor of the scientific journal Accident Analysis and Prevention. He has worked in the traffic safety field for some 40 years and has received several national and international awards for his work, including an Order of Australia in 2007.